Tag: Phillip K. Dick

So it is Friday again and I have done no blogging all week. Bad bad bad. Well I have been rather busy trying to get s few short films/ a feature film set up so I can have work for the next couple of months. We all need money.

Film is a very hard industry to work in when trying to maintain your own creative processes. When the standard day is 11 hours, 8:30-7:30, you are left very tired and often sore in the ears. You have just enough time to cook and eat or/ do some other activity and eat take out. So you only get to be creative or exercise when you are coupling that with eating leftovers or takeout. This is just not a great scenario. Most of the time you just are so tired all you have energy to do is watch a crappy film, even though you have been working on film all day, its just nice to watch a film that starts and ends in 2 hours rather than one that you watch in repeated 4 second loops.

AND…the crappier the film the better. Lets face it…who wants to think at the end of the day…give me ‘The Water Boy’ or something. (Just so you know the Water Boy is not actually crappy…some say it is up there with ‘Gone with The Wind’)

Anyway enough about film. Today I want to talk about Phillip K. Dick.

Would he have been an author who supported the idea of blogging? Well on the one hand he was very skeptical about social media and paranoid about the technological misappropriation of thoughts and memories by government agencies. So my initial reaction would be…No way! But at the same time he was also a very free thinker who was all about sharing his ideas and concerns with others.

As he said:

“Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups… So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.”
-Phillip K. Dick

I guess this is the double edged dilemma of all social media. To be involved and run the risk of exposure/ manipulation and subordination or sit back and let your fears go unannounced, thereby risking not having your voice heard.

When it comes to any technology that has a potential for misuse most people these days don’t really care too much about the negative implications, much less consider them. Most people now, when they hear about some new technology don’t worry at all about the ramifications of that technology being misused. We have become complacent, through a slow process of becoming accustomed to a certain level of progress. Concepts such as cloning have been around for so long now, that we just assume that ‘who ever is in charge will make sure it’s OK’

Daily life seems to churn along just fine, so it must be OK. We know now how quickly computer power is accelerating, it used to be so impressive, but we all know that in 18 months we will need to upgrade all our digital storage devices. Any computers we buy now will be near obsolete by then. We not only expect it, but we are starting to plan for it. making sure our purchasing choices are so cheap that it wont matter when we have to replace them. The microchips in our 10 dollar USB sticks will be next months garbage and that seems to be pretty acceptable.

After all, we aren’t the ones having to put the things together now are we.

Most of us carry on thinking that we don’t really have a choice anymore about stopping the mechanical revolution. The cogs are well and truly set in motion and for many of us the benefits are deeply ingrained in our daily experience of the world.

I remember when I didn’t own a mobile phone. I used to have to arrange to meet people at certain times, in certain places. If I turned up late I would have to do some ACTUAL thinking about where my friend might have gone wandering off to when they got bored with waiting for me. I would have to think, and then search.

Now, I don’t care about being late…I just text them on my way.

I think that it is rather irrelevant of me to even wonder if P.K.Dick would have maintained a blog. I mean really, the guy was a genius, a crazy genius and what I would rather know is what future predictions he would have for our current world.

I for one prefer to be an optimist. While contemplating all the really exciting, action packed, horror outcomes that are implied through ubiquitous computers, virtual realities and artificial intelligence – I like to believe that our prolonged interest in the ‘soul’ of humanity will perpetuate a general status of morality in our species existence.